This help section refers to the Yippy software. For help using the search engine, click here.

Welcome to Yippy!

At first, some people find our site a bit overwhelming. It's not just a simple website that does one lonely thing. It's been described as a cloud; an ever changing shape. It's been described as a river: a quick, fluid site that's deeper than it looks. Both descriptions are right. Here's a little guide on how to tame the Yippy. Once you see what various icons do, your status will be upgraded from novice to pro.

If you are signing in for the first time, you will see that we have defaulted you to our most popular view, Horizontal. This means that the icons are at the bottom of the screen. You can also choose Vertical (icons appear down the right-hand side of the screen), or Standard (icons appear to the right in a block, with a video player.) Since Standard is the most complex view (it enables multi-tasking), much of this tutorial focuses on navigating it, but the buttons are the same in all views. To change your default view, visit your General Prefences (look for the wrench button.)

At the top of your screen, you will find the browser bar. It works much like a regular browser, except that we block over 4.8 million undesirable sites and counting. From left, the buttons are Back, Forward, Refresh, Stop, and Home. In the "Y:", simply enter your URL and off you go! The rest of the buttons are Bookmarks, Search, Preferences, Close Page, and Log Out. You can also navigate between open applications by using the forward and back buttons in our browser bar.

In the top right of the site in Standard View are five linked buttons with the Yippy "Y" in the middle. These are the main controls for the menu that's sitting just below it. The 'Y' button in the middle functions as a "home" key, and will always return you to the main menu. The UP and DOWN buttons are hover scrolls for the menu. The '' buttons move the menu backwards and forwards much like when you use the browser. The menu is fully customizable thanks to the preferences icon at the top of the page - just look for the wrench.

At the lower right of YIPPY in Standard View is a small player. There are four video size settings - Small, Medium, Large, and Full-Screen. The full screen button is inside the player. For a tutorial on how to use the video player, simply click the "?" button on the top right of the inside of the player. We have tons of videos for you to watch, covering almost every entertainment genre (except porn. This site is smut-free thank you very much!)

Here is the main menu that you see when you first come to our site. You can hover over the icon with your mouse for a short description of what the button does, or you can enable "show text" in your Themes, Colors, and Backgrounds Preferences.

1. My Favorites: In the Preferences (look for the wrench button) you can you can create an easy-to-get-to menu of all of your favorite applications.

Email: Use this icon to open up your YIPPY email account, with access to calendars, documents, and much more!

3. Search: Our family-friendly Yippy Search Engine blocks pornography, so it is an asset to any home where parents wish to protect the innocence of their children.

4. Preferences: This is where you go to change Yippy's appearance to suit your personal tastes. You can add and remove things for your 'Favorites' and other menus, change your password or profile information, and change your graphic themes and backgrounds.

5. Chat: The Chat icon opens up in the main browser area, so you can text chat, video chat with multiple people, share public whiteboards, create rooms, and more.

6. News: This section is a monster. Because we have a global audience, we HAD to develop a section that caters to everyone, all over the planet. This too is constantly being expanded. There's local, national, and international news; at least 100 types of sports news, music, technology, and a lot more. Clicking on a news feed opens a list of headlines in your menu, and if you want to read further, click the headline and the full article will open in the browser.

7. Games: We've got a collection of the old-school classics, and a lot of great new games for you to enjoy. Like the Yippy TV, you can play them at three sizes; small, medium, large (Standard View), or you can open them full-size in any other view.

8. Shows: This is the place for videos. They're all categorized by genre. Surfing, comedy, music, stunts, good ol' movies and much, much more. There's literally thousands of hours of videos, and more are being constantly added. So take the day off work and play around. If you click the "Web TV" icon you will see that we have compiled an EPIC list of videos from other sources. This also has the "drop away" menu function.

9. Yippy Radio: We have a radio that you can listen to while you do other things on Yippy!! It streams radio content from various corners of the globe. This has been broken up into musical genres, so choose your favorite and enjoy.

10. Home: Here you can check local weather, news, traffic, sports and stocks.

Tools: Right now this section is pretty small, but more features are being added to make this fully customizable. Right now you can go to preferences to check your vitals and personalize your cloud, contact us, bookmark the site, join our mailing list, and more.

12. Change View: Computer monitors come in many shapes and sizes, and so to combat this we've created three versions of Yippy. Try them out and see which one suits you best. There's the traditional view, horizontal scrolling view and vertical scrolling view. It's very handy to have on the top menu because when you move from your laptop to your computer you can simply switch the views, easy as pie. More importantly, in Vertical or Horizontal mode, the menus can "drop away" with a click of the button when you don't want to see them. Very helpful. Using the "Change View" button helps you "try out" the views during your current session, but if you want your favorite view to be saved for next time you log in, please visit your General Preferences menu and change it for good there.

The preferences icon (the wrench) at the top of Yippy allows you to customize your account to just how you'd like it. It's laid out in a simple manner that you can update any time you wish, as often as your mood suits.
You can change what goes in your main menu, sub menus, your favorites (the icon with the gold star), colors, themes and backgrounds. It is here that you can also select whether you would like to have text beneath your icons, and you can choose how you'd like to view Yippy (standard, horizontal, vertical). You can also change your password and profile information. The way you change your icons is simply by dragging what you want into the drop box, and then click "save". Bingo.

Some things require a submenu, like Home, News, and Shows. After you have chosen your main menu, visit the "SubMenu Preferences" section. As you can see from the diagram, there's a drop down box full of your chosen main menu icons and the drag and drop boxes for your decision-making pleasure.

With the Favorites menu, you can drag any icon from any section of YIPPY and access it from your Favorites Icon in the main menu (shaped like a star.) The "Drag" box contains everything in Yippy, so take your time and move whatever you'd think you like into the drop box. You can always add or subtract more later, of course.

Now for your themes and backgrounds. It's all pretty self explanatory, but here's a tip: If you want a background image to show up everywhere, select "Borderless" in the internal theme drop-down box. In the above example, I am going to choose the "Aqua Board" theme. We have dozens of themes and are always adding more! Many of our themes were created by Patrick Hoesly at zooboingreview.blogspot.com. If you would prefer to have a pre-designed color palette, select anything but "Borderless" for your Internal Theme. If you would prefer to choose your own color, select "Borderless" for your internal theme, "No Image" for your background, and choose a color from the palette below.

This is the Yippy Radio. It has a simple user interface. Click on the radio icon on the main menu, click on the music genre you want to listen to, and the player pops up. It'll give you a few station options. As you can see in the example there are two options for blues; Blues Radio, and Folk. Click on a station and it'll start streaming. If you want to close it, simply click the "x" at the top of the radio module. This will stop your station from playing and hide the radio. If you want to hide the radio but keep listening, click the minimize (minus) button and it will vanish. To bring it back, just click on the Radio icon again to bring your current station, or select a new station to switch genres.

Here is the shining star of this site. As this screen capture shows, you can do multiple things at once, all on one page, without needing to refresh the browser. You have complete control over what you want to do. Take a deep breath and experiment a little. As you can see here, I'm performing a search. To the right, I'm listening to some blues. Beneath the game I'm watching a video from the show "WavesZen", taken from our own footage. Of course you don't HAVE to have all of these things open at once, but the beauty of Yippy is that if you want to, you CAN!! If you want to make the game bigger, it'll expand over the news. Minimize the game again, and the news is still there!!! Simply select "Standard View" from your General Preferences to default to this view.

Want to blow up your game while you watch TV? How about watch tv large, play a game, listen to the radio, and chat at the same time? The possibilities are infinite.

This overview will be updated as we blossom. We have a lot of great ideas that we want to share with you, so stick around. This'll be wild.

The great thing about Yippy is that it's growing all the time. New features, videos, games, news feeds and tools are being added constantly. Consumer demand never wavers, and neither does Yippy. It's all for you, baby.